


by deepest night or brightest day (be lovin’ you)

by mouseymightymarvellous



Series: tales of gutsy shinobi [4]
Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, Probably all the characters will show up eventually, Various Background Relationships - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-04
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-01-08 23:40:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 17,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12264444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouseymightymarvellous/pseuds/mouseymightymarvellous
Summary: They are sidekicks. (Reframe: they are not heroes. They stand at hero's sides, at hero's backs. They are quicksilver smiles and shadowed hands.) They deserve their own soft endings. (Reframe: not great endings. Not happily ever afters and rides into the sunset. But happiness. Just happiness. Happiness for now. That would be enough.)Yet another tumblr oneshot collection.





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> shikaku loves his son and all he wants for shikamaru is happiness, but he is more than just a father. it is a balancing game, then. and he will lie and steal and cheat to get the ending shikamaru deserves.

** i. **

“Your son is unmarried, is he not?”

Shikaku does not smile triumphantly. “He is, yes.”

The two men watch each other carefully.

Shikaku waits, wondering if he’ll ask, if he’ll dare.

Evidently, for all the other clan head’s pride, the thought of tying himself to the main branch of the Nara is enough to prompt him to broach the topic.

“I have several very beautiful, very capable granddaughters…”

“The Nara are a shinobi clan,” Shikaku says. “Our matriarch is, and always has been, shinobi. My cousin’s son, however…

Shikaku can practically see the arithmetic happening behind the old man’s green eyes.

As he continues to praise his cousins’ children, Shikaku lets himself smile.

 

 

 

** ii. **

“You’ve done what?” Shikamaru croaks.

Like a child again, his hands flex on the table and his eyes gleam.

“I’ve accepted an offer.”

“You’ve arranged my marriage.”

Shikaku doesn’t wince, despite how that flat demand slices razor sharp through the room.

Yoshino frets at the sink but doesn’t intervene.

“Yes.”

What colour is left to him drains from Shikamaru’s face.

“But you know how I feel about—“

“Just meet the girl,” Shikaku interrupts. “That is all I’m asking. It will still be your choice, in the end.”

Shikamaru stands up abruptly, his chair skittering behind him with a squeal.

“I think we both know that there is no choice. Not for me. Not when a refusal could ruin the clan.”

Shikaku resists the urge to close his eyes.

His boy. Oh, his child.

“You will always have a choice,” Shikaku manages finally. “I always want you to choose happiness.”

Shikamaru’s jaw flexes and Shikaku can see him swallowing down rage.

And then his son stalks out of the room.

The Nara crest hanging on the wall speaks volumes in the silence.

 

 

 

** iii. **

“It’s unlike you, to gamble so,” Yoshino murmurs to him when they are bundled up in bed.

His wife leans on one elbow, her hand propping up her head so she can look down at him.

Shikaku frowns at her. “I don’t gamble. I know what I’m doing. Nothing in this is up to chance.”

“Oh, my love,” she sighs, all fondness edged with reproach. Their son’s sorrow seeps through the walls of the house they have built together. “It’s always a gamble when you’re playing the game of hearts.”

 

 

 

** iv. **

He is proud as he watches his son walk to his future with his head unbowed, dutiful even in his grief.

Shikaku is so, so proud and so, so ashamed.

Oh, what they make of their children, that these proud adults who were not long ago running knee high knowing nothing but little sorrows and impossible joy are now creatures of duty who fight and bleed and die for their families, for their village.

Oh, what they make of their children, and Shikaku cannot imagine his son as anything other than this man who tucks his hands into the sleeves of his kimono and does not weep for loss.

Yoshino, equally, carries pride and sorrow tucked into her eyes, the corners of her mouth.

“He might not forgive you for breaking his heart,” she has warned him.

It will be worth it.

Shikamaru’s happiness will always be worth it.

The door to the teahouse opens before them, an attendant ushering them in and Shikamaru keeps his eyes up and forward, not daring to look back.

Shikaku wonders what his son’s hands are doing tucked in their folds, wonders how much he is carving the urge to run into the skin of his palms.

The girl is waiting there, his soon-to-be daughter-in-law, and Shikaku, if he were anything other than who and what he is, would let out a sigh of relief.

He’d thought (he’d hoped), but—

No matter. The worries that plagued his dreams are turned to vapour in the daylight.

Haruno Sakura looks up at them.

If he were anything other than who and what he is, Shikaku would have missed the tension in her shoulders that melts away as soon as she sees them.

A small, secret smile breaks across her face.

“Oh,” she says, “it’s you.”

Shikamaru stares at her like a drowning man turns his face up to kiss the sky.

“Thank you,” reads the hand signal that Shikamaru holds his fingers in, out of sight of all but his parents under the table.

As he watches the two of them watch each other, Shikaku could weep for what he’s risked.

His son is a child of shadows and secrets, but his love for this girl turns him to starlight and so much impossible joy.

 

 

 

** v. **

Shikaku watches the delicate wrinkle of her brow as she deliberates, the way a stray lock of hair obscures her eye.

It’s so curious now, to see her here, his soon-to-be daughter-in-law, an after-image of a girl he remembers skirting at the edges of his son’s childhood, stepping softly in Ino-chan’s footsteps. She’s almost too bright to look at, and yet she never outshines Shikamaru, the two of them meeting like a sharp edge, all contrast and continuity.

Suddenly, with a confident hand, Sakura moves a lance.

Shikaku blinks.

And then he really  _looks_  at the shōgi board.

When he looks back up at her, there is something honed and sly lurking in those green eyes.

He remembers, abruptly, exactly who her teachers were.

With a single move, Sakura has turned a game she was losing steadily into something dangerous.

It is not yet checkmate.

But it is only not  _yet_  checkmate.

“I was surprised when your grandfather approached me,” Shikaku finally says.

Sakura raises a single eyebrow.

The motion is familiar, and Shikaku is suddenly uncertain who learned it from whom.

“Were you?” Her voice is light and mild.

“Mm,” Shikaku hums in agreement.

There is a thought, lurking at the edges, but surely not—

“Are you close with your father’s parents?” Shikaku asks, as if he does not know the answer.

“The Haruno are a merchant clan,” Sakura answers, a non-answer that speaks magnitudes.

Even if he were not perfectly aware of almost every fracture line in the clan, Shikaku knows what civilians think of shinobi.

“We are very honoured to establish new trade connections.”

“And we are very honoured to ally ourselves with one of Konoha’s most esteemed shinobi clans.”

Enough.

He is tired of shadows and games.

Shikaku bet his son’s happiness.

He did not think he was betting.

“Do you love my son, Haruno Sakura?” he demands.

The question slices cleanly through the night.

She doesn’t even stutter; a smile, all teeth and poison, dripping from her mouth.

“I do. And I will do everything I can do ensure his happiness.”

Her answer is mountain roots and the pull of the tide.

Shikaku nods.

He wonders just how much she’s done already to ensure it.

He thinks he has an idea.

“Do you often take tea and discuss politics with your grandfather?”

Sakura relaxes back on her hands.

Shikaku doesn’t know that he even realized she was tensed.

“When it suits me,” she says.

Chatter and plates clattering echo out from the kitchen to reach them on the porch.

“We’re about to eat desert,” Shikamaru says. He’s leaning against the door frame and watching them carefully. “Kāchan says you can finish your game tomorrow.”

Sakura springs up and walks over to him, the two of them drawn inexorably into one another’s orbit.

Shikaku looks away, the sight not for his eyes.

When he looks up, they’ve walked, hand-in-hand, back into the house.

He flips two pieces between his fingers. With a touch of slight-of-hand, it looks like a single piece, pawn-king-pawn.

And then he laughs.

Yes, Haruno Sakura will do just fine.

Shikamaru will be happy and the Nara will prosper, and the Village will prosper with them.

Shikaku laughs, because he might not have thought he was gambling with his son’s happiness, but Haruno Sakura’s teachers were Senju Tsunade and Hatake Kakashi.

It is no wonder, then, that she learned to gamble with one hand and to stack the deck with the other.

Yes, she’ll do just fine indeed.

 

 

 

** vi. **

The day of his wedding, Shikamaru smiles so much Shikaku is almost surprised his face doesn’t crack in half.

Sakura is smiling just as brightly.

They’re going to be just fine, these children.

So much impossible joy.


	2. blooming (clouds, dawn, love)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> there comes a point where you will be old enough to once again believe in wonder.

_find shapes in the clouds,  
_ _(fanciful things, right on past the horizon)_

 

Twelve years old and you are already dreaming of twilight years, arthritis in your knuckles, the high-lows of your youth so far behind you, grandchildren at your knees.

You carry a nostalgia too old for your bones, and for all that you are beginning to understand the weight of your future, you’d much rather something simpler.

 

_too young still yet to know better.  
_ _(can’t see the cumulonimbus forming.)_

 

Twelve years old and you already know that the only thing you’ll ever need is this boy with dark eyes who has forgotten how to smile. You could make him smile, you know, if you could just get him to look at you.

You are twelve years old and you dream of the soft dawn breaking that will paint his face the day you marry this boy with grief where his heart might have once been before it rusted away under enough blood to drown.

 

_too young yet to understand the might of storms._  
_too foolhardy yet: run straight into the winds._  
_(have never seen what it is  
_ _to be torn to shreds and less.)_

 

Thirteen and you understand now exactly what rests on your shoulders.

So easy, to lead your friends off a cliff. And you— You are something too cautious (too cowardly) to jump.

How many edges will you stand on, you wonder, looking down at the shattered remains of all that was not yours to risk?

None, you promise, and you kiss soft-amber thoughts of a soft endings goodbye.

_don’t worry, the world has never not learned  
_ _how to pare away softness._

Thirteen and the whole world has slipped through your fingers.

Never again, you swear.

Your hands will never again not be enough.

 

_give it chance enough and time;  
_ _there’ll be nothing left but the echoes of dreams._

 

It is war.

You’d pray that you all make it out alive, but you stopped believing in anything bigger than your bones a long time ago.

_survive, though, and there will be nothing left to break.  
_ _(glue and bandages, chin up, stare the world down.)_

Your nights are half-nightmare still, and maybe they always will be, but you are learning something softer once more.

You watch clouds again and, more days than not, you carry an ever less hazy silhouette behind your eyes.

Twenty-one and you are old enough now to return to childish things. Your palms tingle with the absence of the hands they are waiting for.

There is no life for you now that ends softly, but perhaps you could seize a soft middle.

You blink and the light behind your eyelids is pink.

 

_maybe there will be enough to put back together.  
_ _(it will take even more strength than it did to survive.)_

 

You stand on your own two feet and you have learned that you never needed saving, that no one can ever be saved who does not want saving. You have learned what it is to hold a hand out without the refusal of it putting a crack in your heart and you know now you are capable of building yourself up from the foundation of your own bones only.

You heal flesh and shatter earth and you are not confined wholly by your contradictions.

And you love.

Most importantly, you have learned this is not weakness, to love.

Twenty-one, and there is a boy with dark eyes who watches you carefully, like he understands the circumference of your soul. Your presence makes him smile and he has long learned to how to breathe through sadness, how to let grief fall away, how to reach up a hand and refuse to drown.

The both of you are old and tired enough that you know happy endings are no guarantee.

As you lie side-by-side, elbows bumping and grass tickling the backs of your knees, eyes up to the sky, you watch clouds pass by and dare to see a future spool out in the slow build and fall of water droplets.

When you turn your head to let him fill your vision, you feel the warmth of the dawn spilling in the hollow of your ribs, your heart beating strong.

 

_and just maybe there will be enough._  
_that old dreams may be unboxed from under beds,_  
_dusted gently, lifted up,_  
_and placed back on shelves to be dreamt once again._  
_(the wind blows and clouds disperse and, always,  
_ _the sun rises and rises to kiss the sky.)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt:** ShikaSaku Week 2017, Day 2: Goal/Dream


	3. chills multiplying

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which ino’s terrible couch makes a reappearance, people plot, shinobi are assholes, and shikamaru has to face a morning after. (also, ino is better than you.)

**** It’s whimsical, cloud-watching. You’d think it would be antithetical to his nature.

And yet.

Shikamaru’s eyes are, more often than not, away and beyond, searching for something beyond his grasp.

Something untouchable.

It’s no wonder, really, then, that cloud-watching turned to this.

It’s only that he can’t take her eyes off of her, caught up in imagining everything that isn’t there and will never be.

She doesn’t know, of course.

Shikamaru is very careful that she doesn’t know.

It’s not so easy, unfortunately, to keep it from everyone else.

“You should say something.” Ino bounces down onto the cushion next to him.

Or, well, partly on the couch, but mostly just in Shikamaru’s lap. A touch of chakra and a suddenly outstretched arm mean that he saves most of his drink though. (Shikamaru makes a mental apology to Ino’s couch. The couch, mind you, and not Ino. (He naps on this couch.))

“Rhubarb,” Shikamaru says.

Ino tips her head back on his shoulder and frowns up at him.

“I meant that you should tell Sakura you’re in love with her, I didn’t mean say a random word.”

“You should be more specific.”

“You should be less of a coward, but here we are.”

Shikamaru scowls and does his best to shove Ino off the couch.

It’s not like he’s going to get away with pretending he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. He might has well get some form of revenge.

Of course, Ino is some kind of clinging leech and also alarmingly agile, and he ends up with his face shoved into a cushion and Ino perched on his back after a brief struggle.

His drink, this time, definitely does not make it through the scuffle.

Shikamaru sighs, his cheek smushed up against the upholstery, and sadly watches his very silly margarita soak into obnoxiously purple rug.

At least maybe now Ino will be forced to part with the hideous thing.

It’s a shame about the drink, though. Tenten has gotten much better at mixing alcohol since the first very ill-advised party that ended in the whole lot of them getting lectured about responsibility by a displeased Hyūga Clan Head and a very amused Godaime Hokage. While they were all miserably hungover.

(Personally, Shikamaru is fairly certain he’d take a displeased Hyūga Hiashi over an amused Senju Tsunade any day. They’re both troublesome, but Tsunade-sama’s a sadist, especially when she has the opportunity to dole out rightful punishments.

Also, his mother would be willing to protect him from the Hyūga, but she’d happily throw him to the Godaime to watch him suffer.)

“I mean, I didn’t think you were such a chicken, Shika,” Ino says pleasantly as she digs her heel even more painfully into the pressure point in his thigh.

Shikamaru grunts.

“You’re a vicious bitch, Ino.”

Ino scores her hand through his hair, right along his scalp to curl around the back of his neck, fingernails marking crescent moons in the thin skin of his throat, sparking his nerves alight.

He grits his teeth and doesn’t shudder.

“Stop with the compliments and go do something about your dumb feelings. Your pining needs to stop: it’s making my hair frizz.”

Shikamaru rolls his eyes at the exaggeration and shakes Ino’s hand off.

As if Ino would ever let a minor inconvenience like his hidden and bothersome feelings for her best friends ruin her hair.

“And what, exactly, do you think is going to happen, Ino? She’s got enough on her plate without me going and making our friendship awkward.”

Ino swats his ass.

Shikamaru yelps. “What the _fuck_ , Ino?”

“Stop being an idiot. You’re usually smarter than this. In case you haven’t noticed, the disaster fire of her dumb attempt to return to being twelve burned itself out, like, a year ago. Sakura’s a big girl; if she handled Sasuke-the-bastard, then I’m pretty sure she can handle some awkwardness. And if I have to watch another minute of pining from afar or read one more love poem”—

“I don’t write poetry!” Shikamaru squawks in protest.

“—then I’m going to lock the both of you in a chakra-proof interrogation room at T&I and not let you out until you get your shit sorted the fuck out.”

“You couldn’t get us in there unwillingly,” Shikamaru mutters.

“Oh no?” Ino coos. “Because two full squads of jōnin and ANBU willing to help me drag you there say differently.”

Shikamaru glances around the room.

From the doorway into the kitchen, Sai waves and smiles broadly, before taking a large sip of something toxically yellow and continuing to watch on with interest.

“Naruto should die slowly for the crime of setting the two of you up.”

That’s a… generous reframing of the cluster-fuck of a mission that ended up with Sakura turning an entire human-trafficking ring to fire and ash while Sai and Ino worked together to usurp three corrupt noble houses and the entire monarchy of a small island nation.

But it’s Naruto’s fault for catching some mutant cold that not even the Kyūbi’s chakra could combat it, ensuring that Ino would be the third on that mission.

(Shikamaru considers how much of Naruto’s heroism that one sin counts against.)

“I understand, Shika- _chan_ ,” Ino says, patting his sharply on the cheek, “you only wish you could manage a relationship as badass and terrifying to the Great Elemental Nations.”

“Ino,” a familiar voice interrupts, “if I’m not allowed to fight Naruto tonight for the crime of that orange shirt he’s wearing, then you’re not allowed to torture your teammate either.”

Surreptitiously, just because she can and she’s apparently feeling particularly impish tonight, Ino pinches the back of his arm.

Shikamaru tries to flinch away but, again, she’s currently got him very nicely pinned and Shikamaru doesn’t particularly feel like destroying Ino’s living room.

Less because he’s worried about Ino’s apartment and their friends currently spilled throughout the space, and more because Shikamaru is terrified of Ino’s ancient ex-ANBU landlady with a particular propensity for genjutsu.

Ino sniffs. “Excuse me, but Ino-Shika-Chō missions aren’t the ones that end in a smoking crater where a civilization used to be. If you and Naruto were to get into a fight, the whole block would be gone. We, on the other hand, are subtle.”

Shikamaru can practically hear Sakura’s eyebrows climbing her forehead.

“Right,” she drawls out. “Still, if you’re done _subtly_ torturing your teammate, can I borrow him?”

Shikamaru attempts to sink deeper into the couch, going suddenly completely lax under Ino’s hold.

“He’s all yours,” Ino says, plush innuendo practically dripping from her lips. “Don’t play too rough, though. He’s fragile.”

Ino gracefully rises from her perch on his back like a queen from her throne.

To Shikamaru’s exasperation but not surprise, she still has a martini perfectly balanced in her hand.

“Are you alright?” Sakura asks as they watch Ino sashay away, off to inflict her particular brand of evil on someone else, at least for the moment.

“I’m fine,” Shikamaru tells the cushion his face is buried in.

He can’t see her, but Shikamaru can imagine exactly the look of fond exasperation the is surely painted across Sakura’s face.

“Do you need another drink?”

Shikamaru considers that question.

“Yes,” he tells the floral print.

Ino, the liar, insists that they’re violets.

“I’m just going to bring a bottle,” Sakura finally declares.

Yeah. That’s probably a good idea.

 

 

 

When Shikamaru wakes, daylight is streaming though the giant windows of Ino’s living room, his head is pounding vaguely, and there’s a girl draped across his chest.

For a moment, Shikamaru just runs his fingers through the spill of pink hair obscuring everything, marvelling at the texture of it, carefully working out tangles.

And then he realizes exactly who is attached to said hair and the body draped across him.

Sakura has one of his arms disabled and a chakra scalpel to his next before he can finish attempting to dump her onto the floor in a single, mindless moment of flight.

“Oh,” she says, her voice sleep rough, like a physical thing along his skin. “Shit. Sorry. Let me fix your arm for you.”

It’s barely a brush of a green hand, and then Shikamaru collapses back against the couch, his heart pounding.

He is much too hungover for the number of shocks he’s had this morning.

“How much did we drink?” Sakura asks, wincing now at the sunshine.

Shikamaru considers the empty coffee table and clean floor.

Someone obviously cleaned up.

And _someone_ obviously didn’t see the need to wake them.

(If it wouldn’t have woken her up, Shikamaru would suspect that Ino was the one who dumped Sakura on his chest in the first place. Or, well, who ensured that that’s where Sakura ended up. Ino probably wouldn’t have done the lifting herself.

“A lot?” he guesses.

He thinks back, trying to remember just exactly how the night ended after Sakura returned with a mostly full bottle of something that Kiba picked up in Iwa that could dissolve the rocks there.

And—

Shikamaru gets most of the way through a flash-step when Sakura tackles him to the floor.

“You’re in love with me,” she says.

He doesn’t know what to make of her voice.

The sunlight streaming in through the windows behind her is lighting her hair on fire and casting her face in shadows.

For the first time in maybe his life, Shikamaru is scared of shadows and what they hide.

“You’re in _love_ with me,” Sakura repeats.

Her thighs are warm where they press him to the floor, anchoring him down, and she’s a creature of burning things as she shines.

Shikamaru swallows.

“Yes,” he says.

It cracks out of him, and he winces from it, the sound of it, desperate and honest and terrified.

She scares him so badly.

She could burn him to nothing and he wouldn’t even know how to resist.

(He’d burn gladly, just for a touch of her.)

“Oh thank gods,” Sakura gasps.

And then she steals the breath from him, hair swinging down to encompass them as she kisses him.

She’s—

Oh.

Shikamaru curls his hands around her hips, her shoulder, the back of her neck.

Sakura kisses him, and the world is still.

(“I love you, too,” Sakura tells him.

It’s the foundation from which he stands.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt:** ShikaSaku Week 2017, Day 3: Sky/Earth


	4. moon turned to gold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> they are shinobi: bringers of death. and one day, they know, death will come for them in turn. for now, though, they hold each other tight and hold each wild joyous moment in their mouths, savouring the taste of freedom.

**** “You know, if you were an Uchiha,” says the ring leader as he drags the edge of his knife lovingly down the edge of Shikamaru’s face, blood welling in thin lines at the skin just parts, “or a Hyūga, I’d take your eyes. But no, you: you’re a Nara. And so, I think”—the knife tip slashes a small starburst onto his Adam’s apple—“I’ll take that clever tongue.”

Shikamaru grins, blood in his teeth, all snarl and nothing pleasant.

“Really now? Well then, you’re awing me with your cleverness. It’s not like sign language exists, or your plan would be kind of shitty.”

He winces when he spits out a tooth, head ringing from the punch to his jaw.

Luckily, the shackles around his wrists keep him upright, dangling, toes barely touching the ground.

He’s got wicked cuts from the shackles, the metal slicing right through the thin skin there, bruises etched deep, to the bone.

Shikamaru really hopes those don’t get infected.

Not that he’s expecting to be here much longer.

It’s not long now.

Just a bit further.

He just has to push this group of rogue nin with delusions of grandeur a bit further, and then he can rest.

Every inch of him aches and, deep where they’ll never find it, Shikamaru is nursing his grief for the team of dumbass chūnin who got in over their heads and will now never make it home.

God, he can’t believe he was ever that young, ever thought he was that invincible.

He’s so tired.

But he can’t let it show, so he lets it go, lets the exhaustion and the sorrow fall silently, unnoticeably from his shoulders, from his spine.

Almost, now.

“Well then,” says the man with the knife, “maybe I’ll take your hands too.”

He’s grinning when he says it, and Shikamaru’s blood runs cold.

He could live without his voice. He could live silently.

But not his hands.

(Blurring through hand signs and moving shōgi pieces and touching his wife and holding the children they’ll have one day.)

Shikamaru is many things, but he is, perhaps, a shinobi most of all. He stares his captor in the face and does not flinch.

“What do you think? One finger at a time, or the whole hand, all at once?”

Shikamaru is silent as they pull him down from the hook he’s been suspended on: a helpless, wriggling fish.

The seal slapped on his shoulder keeps right on sucking away his chakra and when he snaps one man’s neck with his thighs for the crime of getting too close, too careless, multiple people hit him with lightning jutsu.

By the time he comes to, nerves still sparking, they’ve got him strapped to a table, his arms outstretched.

He’s waking, but they slap him across the face regardless.

“Wakey, wakey!”

Shikamaru bares his teeth and swallows back a curse.

“You know, I think I’m going to enjoy this.”

Shikamaru wants to close his eyes against the face looming over him, wants to imagine his wife’s face, wants to sink down into that space in his head where all is soft and lovely and he’ll never wake.

“Not, I think,” says an all-too familiar voice (he must be hallucinating, the lightning must have done more damage than he thought), “as much as I am.”

There is, Shikamaru muses—relief running heady in his veins—a certain dark satisfaction to seeing your keeper and torturer for the past six days (well, at least, his best guess is six days) with a hand through his ribcage.

The blood is warm on his face.

Suddenly, the hand jerks back and the man with the knife crumples to the floor.

A demon with a crooked grin smiles down at him, bone sharp and pale as death.

Her hair is a violent riot around her face and there’s a heart in her hand.

“I’ll only be a moment, sweetheart. Just need to deal with a few minor inconveniences.”

Shikamaru smiles back, as wide as he can, cuts cracking back open and bruises aching. He’s a mess and she’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

Then he closes his eyes and waits, content to be lulled on the symphony of screams that she draws forth.

“Hey.”

A calloused hand on his cheek.

Shikamaru opens his eyes to familiar green.

Her mask is on the table next to her hip.

“Sakura,” Shikamaru sighs.

“Hey,” she says again, just an edge of tears there, but then she blinks, and she’s cold competence again. “My team is clearing the rest of the compound now. We should be safe. I’m going to a full scan, but I’m only going to heal what’s needed to be able to move you safely. Then we’re running straight through to the border.”

“The kids—”

“Don’t worry,” Sakura interrupts him, all brisk reassurance, “Sparrow is making sure that we bring their bodies home.”

Shikamaru swallows tightly and nods. “Good.”

Then, just for a moment, she softens again, threading her fingers through his hair to cup the back of his head.

Shikamaru relaxes into the touch, neck muscles relaxing, head falling back into the steadiness of her, throat bared.

Sakura presses a fleeting, fierce kiss to the underside of his jaw: a brand.

Shikamaru shivers.

“I got you,” she promises. “You’re safe.”

“I know,” Shikamaru says, and he lets himself fall to pieces in her hands.

The long trip home, he’s pressed against the heat of her, his nose buried in her familiar scent.

Another time, maybe, he’d be embarrassed to be carried.

But for now, Shikamaru doesn’t care.

He’s making it home to hold his wife.

He’s tired.

He sleeps.

 

 

 

Sakura’s whole body is pulled taught, her hands fisted in the sheets, jaw gritted.

Shikamaru squints at her in the moonlight, bleary eyed and still half-asleep.

“Hey,” he murmurs, not daring to touch her. “Hey, Sakura. Love, wake up.”

Her head thrashes, hair spilling, and a pained moan claws its way into the night, out of the soft cavern of her mouth.

“Sakura,” Shikamaru says.

Still, she’s caught in the thrall of whatever terror has crept out of the box she usually keeps it in.

“Haruno!” Shikamaru snaps.

Sakura bolts upright, green-laced fingers carving a path through the air, wicked sharp.

Out of instinct—and habit—Shikamaru ducks the wild swing, lunging to pin her back to the mattress.

“Sakura,” he says, hand cupping her jaw, “it’s just me.”

All at once, the fight drops out of her.

Shikamaru lets more of his weight rest on her, keeping her here, with him, the both of them safe.

Sakura’s hands wrap around his back, clawing at the skin they find, trying to draw him closer, trying to claw him deeper.

“Hey,” he tells her, breath hot on her cheek. “Hey. I’ve got you. You’re safe. We’re safe.”

Too slowly, the panic bleeds from her and into the mattress.

Too slowly, she turns liquid under him, her hands less desperate.

“You almost died,” she tells him, she tells the night.

Shikamaru swallows and presses his face into the hollow of her throat. “I didn’t. though. You found me in time.”

One day, they both know, one of them won’t make it home.

(They’re both just praying that it’s them who bleeds out, so far from Konoha’s walls. They’re both just praying that it’s never only them in this bed, with nothing but their nightmares and, worse, their memories for company.)

“You almost died,” Sakura repeats.

All Shikamaru can do is press a kiss to her throat: a brand.

“I got you,” he promises.

Sakura wraps her arms tighter around him.

“I know.”

They hold each other—skin on skin and so much grief—until the sun starts to break.

Nothing is fixed.

This is nothing that can be fixed.

But they are here, together, and the dawn is spilling wild and brilliant across the horizon.

As the sky turns pink, Sakura falls asleep.

Shikamaru holds her and listens breathing for a long time.

He doesn’t let go.


	5. unmade; unmaking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> they know full well that they will die one day. given their profession, likely bloody and gasping. but not like this. shikamaru refuses.

**** “Oh no,” says one of the chūnin working Sakura’s lab. “I think I made a mistake.”

His voice is untethered, almost dreamy, with deep currents of panic just waiting underneath to sweep them all away.

Sakura is running for his bench before she’s even completely registered the bottle in his hand, her fingers running through hand signs, shouting at everyone else to “get out, get out, evacuate NOW,” knowing in her bones that it’s too late, the godsdamned _idiot_ , she should have insisted he be put to filing even after Tsunade-shishō had looked at her guiltily and thrown the personnel file at her head because Sakura doesn’t care _who_ his grandfather is, he’s a self-righteous, useless, _dangerous_ moron who shouldn’t be trusted with a goldfish let alone explosive compounds.

Sakura flashes through the last hand signals and she feels the chakra snap into place even as she tackles the unmitigated sack of wet socks to the ground, as far from the violently reacting chemicals as she can get him.

She thinks she hears at least one of his bones snapping as they land, the oozing bread mould underneath her screaming silently for the lack of breath left in his lungs, but Sakura is doing the particular twist of chakra that undoes her Yin seal and can’t pay attention to that because

all

there

is

is

light.

 

 

“Ow,” Sakura tells the all too familiar white ceiling of the hospital.

She should really do something about that.

The white is a little blinding after, well, however long Sakura has been unconscious.

She doesn’t usually spend a lot of time on this side of the bed.

“I think,” Sakura continues. Her throat hurts and her voice is an unfamiliar rasp of sound. “I _think_ I might have made a mistake.”

“Really?” asks someone familiar, who—and Sakura is just assuming here that it’s the same person—shoves a glass of water with a straw into her face.

Sakura considers the voice.

She’s pretty sure she knows this person.

She takes as many long, desperate sips of perfect, precious, soothing water as she can before the hand—cruelly—pulls the glass away.

“If you drink much more, you’re going to make yourself sick,” the voice warns.

There’s something sharp there that Sakura instinctively winces at.

She turns her head as little as possible, trying to minimize the amount of aching, to get a glimpse of the owner of the voice.

A wild shock of black and dark eyes over darker bruises and an ugly curve she doesn’t recognize to his mouth and—

“Shika,” Sakura sighs. “You took your ponytail out.”

“Oh good,” Shikamaru drawls out, like a blade from a sheath, “you recognize me. Tsunade-sama wasn’t certain you would, given the fact that the only reason you’re still alive is that you managed to release your Yin seal. If you hadn’t had time, you’d probably be a charred skeleton right about now.”

Sakura winces.

(There’s a pit in her mind where she keeps the broken strangled things that scream in the night—assassinations she’s committed so bloody the Village keeps no record, the particular way Naruto’s face cracked when she looked him in the eye and lied about loving him, the way it felt to have Sasuke’s hand take her heart in his palm and squeeze— all the things that hurt too much to remember.

Now joining the writhing pile: what it was to be unmade and unmade and unmade, fire and blood and screaming, even as her vocal chords burned away, heat on her back and in her veins, and is this what it is to be a star? It hurts too much.

(She would have died without a second thought if the Yin seal had let her.)

“Has the investigative report come out yet? I only saw part of what that rotting dish rag had mixed before it all went to hell.”

Sakura should probably asked if the idiot survived, but frankly, they might be better off if he didn’t, for all that the Utatane Clan is going to throw a fit over their heir dying in a lab accident.

“Sakura,” Shikamaru says, “there wasn’t enough of the lab for a proper investigation.”

Sakura blinks.

“What?” she croaks.

That is months, years, _decades_ of work, all lost.

Some of it has back ups elsewhere in the Village, and beyond, but that was _Sakura’s lab_. The lab her shishō gave her complete control over (with a little bit of supervision) at age fifteen.

Sakura has engineered the rise and fall of regimes in that lab, mastered impossible jutsu in that lab, discovered hitherto unknown secrets in that lab. In a world where so much of what she is belongs to other people, her lab is the one and only place that is completely and utterly her own, her own accomplishments, her own legacy.

“Is Daichi still alive?” she asks.

Shikamaru looks at her. “The warning you gave was enough for all but two of your lab assistants to get out safely, and that barrier jutsu you triggered saved the entire block. Utatane-san is dead.”

Sakura’s jaw flexes.

“That’s a pity,” she says. “I wanted to kill him myself.”

“You almost killed _yourself_ for that spoiled useless—” Shikamaru’s hands flex and the shadows under the bed loom suddenly, flaring up the walls to tower.

Sakura watches the way the vein in his temple pounds as Shikamaru struggles with the rage she can see boiling under his skin.

She doesn’t know if she’s ever seen him furious like this.

She doesn’t know if she’s ever seen him so out of control.

“Shika,” Sakura says.

She grits her teeth against the pain as she reaches out to lay her hand over his own.

Even that effort exhausts her.

“You almost _died_ ,” Shikamaru says, and Sakura wants to cry for the way his voice is ground down, grief and rage and so much fear carving wide canyons into it, deep enough that she cannot see their bottoms.

His voice rasps against her tender skin, scoring bloodied lines across her heart.

“Shika,” Sakura says, “I’m alive.”

Shikamaru swallows heavily. “If you weren’t who you are, _what_ you are, you would be dead. Anyone else, and that explosion would have killed you. It went off _three godsdamned feet from you_ , Sakura.”

He looks at her helplessly, and there are tears now, on his face, streaming down his cheeks, wearing riverbeds into his skin.

“Shika—” Sakura tries to reach up and wipe some of those tears away because he should never cry, especially not for her, but her useless hand falls down before she can quite manage it, her muscles giving out.

“Fuck,” he says, leaning out of his chair to get closer to you, “are you okay? I should have called a nurse. I shouldn’t be getting you worked up. You should be resting, you need rest.”

“I’m fine,” Sakura says, but her eyelids are getting heavy, getting too heavy to lift, for all that she wants to stay awake. “Stay?” she manages to slur through her suddenly uncooperative mouth.

“I’ll be here when you wake up,” Shikamaru promises.

As she falls asleep, she’d swear he presses a kiss to her palm.

 

 

“Will the Utatane be a problem, shishō?” Sakura asks.

She’s slumped in her chair on the other side of the Hokage’s desk. Normally, she’d be standing for a report, despite how long a report of this nature can be, but she’s still easily exhausted, even though she’s been awake for most of two weeks now.

“Given that I have eight different testimonies outlining exactly how much the late Utatane Daichi fucked up?” Tsunade-shishō raises one eyebrow and smirks. She also looks pointedly at Sakura’s left hand, as an additional point. “They’re lucky I’m not squeezing them to pay for the rebuilding of your lab. But we can talk about that another time. Your boy has been lurking outside of my office for four weeks now, it’s making me cranky. Get him out of my hair. Finally.”

Sakura doesn’t bother to gauge her shishō’s humour; she goes.

“Hey,” she greets him from the doorway.

On either side of her, the masked ANBU guards are pretending not to snigger.

Shikamaru glares at them.

“Hey,” he greets back.

His hands are shoved deep in his pockets, in his typical slouch of nonchalance, but Sakura can almost taste the way he wants to touch her.

But not here.

Not where anyone can see.

“C’mon,” Sakura tells him, “let’s go home.”

 

 

Shikamaru takes her back to the home that they share, even though, by tradition, they shouldn’t be living together until they’re married.

But Shikamaru had brought her here once she was released from the hospital, the rest of the things she stores in the small apartment she keeps but rarely sleeps in having suddenly joined her clothes already hanging in the closet and her books already sitting on the shelves and her favourite mug still drying on the drying rack under the window where sunshine filters through from between the leaves of the trees that stand at the edge of the Nara Forest. Shikamaru had brought her home, something fierce and possessive and dark in his face when he wrapped her in one of his shirts and tucked her into his bed, and Sakura hadn’t argued, hadn’t wanted to argue.

Now, Shikamaru pushes her down onto that bed and, with fingers so gentle it hurts, takes her to pieces.

Sakura is fire and blood, something of light and flesh, something living, something that wrenches out desperate gasping sounds into the air that all sound like “Shikamaru, Shikamaru, Shikamaru”.

Shikamaru takes her apart under his touch and Sakura is unmade.

“You could have died,” he breathes into the crease of her thigh.

Sakura cards her fingers through his loose hair.

“But I didn’t,” is all she can offer him.

“You can’t die and leave me,” he tells her, when he’s buried so deep in her she can’t understand how they could ever be anything but two hearts beating in tandem.

Sakura pulls him down and kisses the pleas from his lips.

She wishes that she could offer him more promises than this, the way she shatters around him, the cold band of his ring pressed against the back of his skull.

Sakura kisses him, because she will not lie.

As she is unmade by him, Sakura is more than willing to die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt:**


	6. buddy system

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> they grow up together, distant stars. and yet...
> 
> in some woods, parallel roads meet.

Shikamaru understands very young that Ino and Chōji are his. He doesn't quite know what that means yet, doesn't know what it means to be Ino-Shika-Chō, he just knows that they are his to protect and watch over and guide. His to make sure nothing ever touches.

So when Ino drags in a little pink-haired waif and declares her to be her "new very best friend Sakura" and then, later, privately, to only Shikamaru and Chōji, hers to protect and mould and see bloom, well. What is Ino's to protect is Shikamaru's to protect, and so Haruno Sakura unknowingly finds herself pulled into the tangled web of love and loyalty that are the Yamanaka-Nara-Akimichi.

Sakura is constantly there, a distant planet in his solar system, and Shikamaru gets used to seeing her in unexpected corners of clan gatherings when he's trying to find a place to duck out from under his mother's watchful eye and his father's steering hand and all the duties that sit around his shoulders as clan heir.

She's good at finding quiet spots where they'll go undisturbed for at least a little while, longer than Shikamaru usually manages on his own.

If his parents decide to let him scarper off, it's usually Ino who finally stomps up to their hiding place—food that Chōji has brought scattered amidst playing cards as the three of them (and sometimes additional cousins from one clan or another) play something fast and vicious that uses choice food items for collateral—and harangues them all into rejoining the festivities.

Shikamaru has calculated that their odds of getting Ino to join them go up over fifty percent when Sakura is there to look sadly up at Ino through the fan of her lashes and ask, in a quiet voice, if they can't all play just one more round.

Ino typically demolishes them all, but Shikamaru gets out of being quizzed by a distant aunt about his Academy test scores.

He'll take it.

 

 

 

Everything about him is dark, like the shadows his clan is so famed for, but what makes Sakura wary is the banked flames behind his eyes.

Shikamaru sees so much.

She's never notices before.

To be fair, Sakura has never spent much time with clan kids. They don't exist on the same plane as the civilian children.

Sakura doesn't quite know why that is yet, not really, but she knows that it's true.

And she knows that she's breaking some unspoken rule with the way she lets Ino pull her around by the hand. Of course, Sakura couldn't have refused either.

She hasn't quite figured out how to resolve that conundrum yet.

The rest of the civilian girls in the Academy have made sure Sakura understands that she's broken the rules; she's had to hide the bruises from Ino from where she's been bumped into walls and hit a little too hard during taijutsu practice while none of the senseis were watching close enough.

Ino would do something if she knew, and Sakura doesn't dare let Ino interfere again.

Not for this.

Which is how Sakura has found herself amid circle of girls she knows: who have shoved her into the dirt or called her names or tried to sabotage her homework assignments, who even before Ino's intervention hated her because Sakura is a civilian kid but she reads a lot and she's got a good memory and her test scores have put her high—too high—in the class rankings.

Sakura should know better than to make herself visible, but she likes the way Kano-sensei smiles at her when she hands Sakura back a test with no markings but the smiling face in the top corner and a perfect score.

But Sakura isn't all that clever, because if she were clever, she would have known better than to dawdle after class, Ino long run home for "clan business".

If Sakura were clever, she wouldn't be pushed against a wall, bruises from quick fingers blooming on her skin and these terrible awful words ringing in the air.

Sakura doesn't need them to say it.

Sakura already knows.

"She doesn't actually care about you, you know."

"You're just a toy. She'll get bored."

"Who do you think you are, Haruno?"

"You're just a civilian."

"You aren't any better than the rest of us."

"Yamanaka-san is just playing with you. I hope she breaks you."

Sakura's chin is tucked down to her breastbone and her hands are fisted at her sides, blood welling in her palms from where her nails have pierced, and she wishes they would just go away, leave her alone, because she is going to cry but Ino told her to never cry because that's what bullies like these want except that Ino doesn't actually care, has never cared, never meant any of it, Sakura never deserved any of it—

"This might surprise you," says a familiar voice from outside the circle, "I know it continues to surprise me, but Ino is actually very gentle with her toys. Clan heirs, you see, we're taught to be careful with our things. It's good training for future responsibilities."

For the rest of her life, Sakura will never forget the horrified silence that falls, herself at the centre of it.

For the rest of her life, Sakura will never forget how, for a moment, her entire world turns on the voice of this boy she only barely knows.

Shikamaru is standing with his hands in his pockets, mostly slouched, talking conversationally.

And then he smiles, a slow dripping thing that is too old and too dark for a boy so young.

Sakura stands straighter and pushes her hair back out of her eyes, dashes the tears from her face.

"Hey, Sakura," Shikamaru says to her. He doesn't look at any of the girls standing around her. "Let me walk you home."

It isn't a question.

Sakura wouldn't have refused.

After a long, long silent walk, Shikamaru asks, "How long has the bullying been going on?"

Sakura ducks her head.

He sighs.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she mumbles.

He sighs again. "Sakura, I know what bullying looks like. You should tell an adult, they'll intervene."

Sakura smiles bitterly at him through her hair. "They won't. It isn't their place. Don't worry about me, Shikamaru."

Shikamaru frowns at her.

"Then tell Ino. Or if you don't want to tell Ino, tell me. They shouldn't be allowed to do that to you."

Sakura shrugs.

"No, Sakura." Shikamaru stops her with a gentle touch to the elbow.

Sakura freezes.

"I mean it. I won't let them keep doing that to you."

His eyes burn right through her, and Sakura is helpless to look away.

"Promise me you'll come tell me if they keep trying things like that with you."

Sakura swallows heavily. The tears welling in her eyes are streaking the world silver.

"I promise," she croaks out.

Shikamaru just keeps staring at her for a long moment, but eventually he nods, and his gaze releases her.

"Oh, and Sakura?"

Shikamaru brushes her hair behind her ear so he can look at her fully.

"Ino wouldn't lie to you. You really are her friend."

They say nothing more.

Shikamaru walks her to her door, and stands at the front gate until she shuts it behind her.

 

 

 

"Sakura-chan," Ino demands, "why are you playing boring old man games with Shika?"

Shikamaru frowns at Ino when Sakura blushes and drops her head, shrinking into herself.

"Ah, I like it?" she whispers.

"What was that?"

"Go away, Ino," Shikamaru orders, "we're almost done."

He doesn't like to watch the way Sakura diminishes under Ino's rough treatment.

Sakura is fragile in ways that neither of them really understand but they can both see the way she wilts sometimes, like a flower under too much heat or a beaten dog.

Ino should know better.

Anyways, Sakura is a passable opponent. He beats her every time, but she learns quickly and he likes the way she brightens when he explains the strategy behind a particular move. And she's one of the few people his age who is willing to sit still and put in the effort to play a game as involved as shōgi.

Ino should leave them to their game. She's the one who abandoned them first anyways.

"We'll come find you when we're done." Shikamaru tries to wave her off.

Ino huffs and seats herself contrarily on the ground next to the board.

"No," she declares. "I don't trust you two not to just never show up. Sakura, you shouldn't humour this lazy bum when he wants to get out of real work and go cloud-watching."

Shikamaru rolls his eyes at Ino, and Sakura seems to take some strength from the gesture.

"Cloud-watching is more interesting than being called another wrong name by your uncle as he talks to me about flower imports, Ino-chan. Just because my family are civilians, doesn't mean we're involved in trade!"

Ino waves a careless hand, but lets the argument stand.

"You two better not draw this out longer than it needs to be. We have places we need to be. Or, well, I have places I need to be and you're both coming with me."

This time, Shikamaru and Sakura roll their eyes in unison.

He leads Sakura in a complicated dance of moves, even though they both know he could have beaten her twenty moves past.

Shikamaru likes the way Sakura bites her lip against the giggles building between her ribs.

For this brief summer moment, she's a creature of mischief and she's never known fear.

 

 

 

Sakura scrubs at her face angrily.

She's done with crying.

And she doesn't want him to find her crying, except he's here already, and her back is to him, but she's sure he knows from the set of her shoulders.

"Go away, Shikamaru," Sakura orders.

Instead, he sits down beside her with a heavy sigh.

She's surprised his knees don't creak.

He's so dramatic.

"You and Ino are being stupid," Shikamaru tells her.

Sakura scowls and sniffs once, viciously, before wheeling her around to face him.

"Shut up. You can't understand."

Shikamaru loops his arms around his knees and stares up at the sky, ignoring her scowling.

"I don't understand what is so great about Uchiha Sasuke that you're going to abandon your friend for him. Have you even spoken to him?"

"Shut up. You don't know what you're talking about. Stop pretending like you're so much smarter than me. I know what I'm doing."

At some point, Sakura has stood. She doesn't remember intending to, but she's towering over Shikamaru now, blocking out his view of the clouds above.

Her fists are clenched and she's panting with anger and she doesn't know why she's so angry, but she's boiling over with it.

It isn't for Shikamaru except in all the ways that it is.

"Stop trying to control me!"

Shikamaru just blinks up at her, not answering, puzzlement on his brow.

He sighs again.

Sakura wants to hit him.

"You're my friend, Sakura, I'm just trying to help."

"I don't need your help. Stop pitying me. I don't need you."

When she gets home, she sinks into her bed and sobs.

Sakura kind of hates herself for the way Shikamaru's dark eyes went hurt and liquid for a moment before turning inward and the moment was lost.

Not enough to apologize, though.

Sakura stops going to Yamanaka-Nara-Akimichi clan gatherings.

The whispers don't stop though.

If anything, they get worse.

Sakura presses on, keeps pulling her hair out of her face, tilts her chin up, gets top marks.

Somedays she passes Shikamaru bent over a shōgi board.

She pretends she doesn't see him wave her over, in an offer to let her join.

 

 

 

The thing about missing Sakura, is that Shikamaru didn't know she was something to be missed.

 

 

 

"Are you happy with your team?" Shikamaru asks.

Sakura reflexively brushes the metal plate of her hitai-ate.

"Are you?" she asks in turn, instead of answering.

Shikamaru leans forward and braces himself on the bridge. "I'm terribly surprised," he deadpans.

Sakura snorts.

She doesn't lean in to bump his shoulder with her own.

"Did your sensei make you do a final test?"

Shikamaru glances at her without turning his head. He shrugs.

No. Of course not. No testing for Ino-Shika-Chō.

Sakura swallows and doesn't grit her teeth.

"Good luck with your training, Shikamaru," she tells him and walks off.

Sakura thinks that maybe he wants to stop her, but he lets her go.

Her neck aches with the weight of keeping it up: hitai-ate and all.

 

 

 

Shikamaru is thirteen when he realizes nothing is ever going to be the same, that everything has already changed and he just didn't notice.

Or maybe this is how it was always going to turn out.

He should have known better.

He was born for this.

But: Sakura wild-eyed with her hair two-thirds gone and blood in her mouth.

Shikamaru is thirteen, and his heart is beating too fast because it has finally become real that none of them are going to get out of life alive.

 

 

 

Sakura thought she knew pain.

And then Team 7 shatters underneath her and there is nothing she can do to stop it.

 

 

 

"Why didn't you bring me?"

Sakura's voice shatters the silence of the hospital hallway.

Shikamaru doesn't look up.

He can feel her wince though.

"I didn't— That's not what I meant to start with," Sakura acknowledges, not quite an apology. She inhales sharply and sits down on the same bench, not close enough for him to feel her though.

"How is Chōji?" she asks instead.

Shikamaru can't fight the way his shoulders round with the weight of that, can't quite swallow down the sob in his chest.

And then Sakura is right there, her thigh pressed up against the length of his own.

"I'm sorry I wasn't there. I should have been there to help."

Shikamaru has never understood that thread of self-loathing Sakura has carried as long as he's known her, but he gets it now.

Not where it comes from, in her, but the feeling of it, under your skin.

"I'm glad you weren't," he manages through the knifes in his throat.

Sakura tenses.

"I couldn't have stood it if another one of my friends was hurt under my command."

Shikamaru sinks into the soft press of Sakura's hand to the back of his neck.

She's so gentle, but for the way her other hand is digging viciously into her own knee.

"It's not up to you to clean up Team 7's messes," Sakura says.

Shikamaru doesn't know what to do with the crack down the middle of her voice, the abyss peering through.

She sounds too old and too furious.

"It's not up to you, either, Sakura. This was bigger than us."

He looks up and her smile chills him.

"Guess I'll just have to get 'bigger', then."

Sakura stares at him for a long moment, and Shikamaru can only stare back.

Then she nods abruptly, and the moment breaks.

"I'll see you around, Shikamaru," Sakura says. "Don't be too hard on yourself."

 

 

 

Team 7 isn't Shikamaru's responsibility.

Sasuke isn't Shikamaru's responsibility.

Sakura wonders if there will come a day when she regrets letting Sasuke walk away.

He's her responsibility.

(Sakura is a lot of things, but stupid enough to not believe Sasuke might turn her down is not one of them.)

She isn't really sure why she does it, except that Sakura remembers the way Ino grit her teeth and let Sakura walk away from their friendship like it was a burden.

She isn't really sure why she does it, except that Ino looked at Sakura across a wide space and laughed as they fought with something like violence, with something like respect.

She isn't really sure why she does it, except that Sakura knows that some flowers can't bloom if you suffocate them and that there are scars Sasuke carries that she will never understand and that she will do anything to make sure he comes home one day.

Sakura is a lot of things; she wonders if being a bleeding heart will kill her one day.

Or worse, kill someone she should have been strong enough to protect.

 

 

 

It's three years of peace and Shikamaru itches with it.

Because he knows it's only a facsimile, a smokescreen.

It's hard to miss, with the whispers, with the looks, with the way Konoha is floundering under the weight of so much loss.

Shikamaru is a chūnin and he carries all the responsibility of that rank, all the responsibility he never really wanted but could have never chosen to refuse.

He is the Nara Clan heir.

(And his teammates, his friends, almost died under his command, under his mistakes and Shikamaru will not fail the way he almost failed again.

He refuses.)

Shikamaru knows now what it means to be Ino-Shika-Chō; he knows that they are his, that the village is his, to protect and watch over and guide. His to make sure nothing ever touches.

He spins himself webs of shadows and waits for the first vibrations.

It won't be long now.

(Gods help them all.)

 

 

 

Sakura breaks herself under Tsunade-shishō's training, hoping to make herself something new.

She wonders if she's disappointed when she looks in the mirror and she's still simply, only ever, herself.

 

 

 

They get paired together more than he would have thought, necessarily.

But Sakura is without her team, and so she borrowed his, and when she stumbles back into Konoha arm-in-arm with Chōji and Ino, the three of them wearing chūnin vests proudly, something in Shikamaru's chest stutters.

The Hokage pairs her with them often, though they're all busy enough that Shikamaru works with his team only maybe half the time he's on missions.

Sakura slips in alongside them with an ease that should be strange considering who the three of them are and what she is: an outsider.

But Ino pulled Sakura into their orbit so long ago that it's natural to readjust their rhythms so that she can stay there comfortably.

What's strange is that it isn't strange.

Sakura sits with him sometimes as the fire is dying and plays a game of shōgi.

She never wins.

But she comes closer than he'd like a couple times.

Judging by the way she laughs at him with her eyes, Sakura knows it too.

 

 

 

It's only when Naruto is back and they're trying to piece Team Kakashi back together that Sakura realizes that maybe they never had much of a rhythm at all.

Naruto is lost and spinning loose without Sasuke there to balance him.

And Sakura?

Maybe Sakura was never necessary at all.

 

 

 

"War isn't honourable," his father had told him.

It had been night and the forest was sighing and the fragile peace they'd struggled the past years to keep was on the verge of shattering.

"It's going to be ugly and bloody and you aren't going to be the same when it's over, even if you make it out alive."

When Shikamaru looks back on all that he did to make sure they made it through, so little of it is honourable.

Naruto was a creature of light. Naruto was something to believe in.

But Shikamaru looks to Ino and Sakura, to Sai and Neji, to Kakashi and Tsunade-sama, and he knows all too well what they all did to ensure that the war would end and Konoha would still be standing by the end of it all.

So little of it was honourable, so little wasn't ugly and bloody.

As he rests his head against Chōji's shoulder, Ino spread across their laps asleep, keeping an eye on Sakura as she filters through the tent checking injuries, his heart aching with the places his father and Asuma-sensei and so many others are missing, Shikamaru would take back none of it.

They're alive, some of them, and that will have to be enough.

 

 

 

"Sakura."

Hands are taking the scrolls from her, leading her down to sit.

"Sakura, sweetheart, when was the last time you slept?"

She has blood in the creases of her palm.

She thought she'd washed it all out.

"Hey, no, none of that."

Those same hands take her own, stop herself from rubbing her skin off.

There's so much blood on her.

"Hey, Sakura, look at me."

Sakura looks up.

It takes too long for her eyes to focus.

"Shikamaru," she murmurs.

Shikamaru smiles. Or, well, the muscles in his cheeks twitch.

"Yeah, it's me. When did you sleep last? Shizune kicked you out of the healing tents hours ago."

Sakura blinks.

She doesn't know.

She can't remember.

All she can remember is the screams and the dying.

She shrugs.

"Sakura," Shikamaru admonishes her, "you need to sleep. I'm surprised you haven't collapsed from chakra exhaustion yet."

"There are things I need to get done," Sakura says.

Her voice is shot through and ruined.

"You aren't any good to anyone exhausted. C'mon, let's find you a bed."

Sakura tries to fight him off, but her limbs are so heavy, and Shikamaru lifts her almost effortlessly into his arms.

She clings to his vest and buries her face in the crook of his neck.

He smells like sweat and dust and iron, but his pulse beats firmly against her cheek.

When she wakes, hours and hours later, she's tucked into the curve of his body. Ino's hair is in her mouth. Chōji is snoring at their feet.

There are screams trapped in Sakura's throat, but familiar hands gentle her back down.

She sleeps.

They're alive.

It's enough.

 

 

 

Konoha will never be what it was.

But Shikamaru thinks of ROOT, thinks of Orochimaru, thinks of the way Naruto was sacrificed to a demon for their salvation and the village cursed him for it, and he thinks that maybe, it is better that they build something new.

He'd always planned on retiring early, but rebuilding Konoha will be the work of a lifetime (of all their lifetimes, all of them who survived to have hands to raise the future they want to see).

He doesn't regret it.

Ino bumps his shoulder as she passes by him, nails and hammer in hand to affix the beam Sakura is currently supporting.

Above them, Kiba almost slips and falls laughing when Shino makes a particularly dry joke.

A clump of Naruto's clones are taking directions from Hinata.

They're alive.

They rebuild.

 

 

 

Sasuke never really learns how to come home, but Sakura doesn't ache with it. He visits to mock Naruto's Hokage training and to go shopping at the market with her for vegetables and he sends them letters sometimes and when he smiles, she thinks he might even mean it.

Naruto is settled into his skin in a way she could have never imagined. She'd swear he glows when the light hits him the right way. He's going to be Hokage one day and Sakura knows he'll be amazing.

Ino flirts outrageously and runs most of T&I from behind the front desk of the Yamanaka flower shop, a magazine in her perfectly manicured hand.

Chōji and Shino and Lee and Tenten all take genin teams and get into an ever escalating rivalry over who can perform the most successive D-rank missions. Tsunade-shihō particularly enjoys sending all sixteen of them out of the village to help with rebuilding infrastructure. (The growing bandit problem across Hi no Kuni, coincidentally, is shortly quashed.)

Kiba joins ANBU for two months, realizes he hates it, and starts training therapy dogs.

Sai, with some help, starts working on reintroducing ex-ROOT members to society. The dogs help.

Hinata retires from active service and—after disappearing into the library for several months and whispered conversations with Naruto and Kakashi—in an explosive week, abolishes the Caged Bird Seal and reorders the Hyūga clan completely. And then she hands over control of the clan to Hinabi and opens a knitting store. Her stitch and bitch sessions are particularly popular with retired jōnin.

Sakura is at the hospital and in her lab and at the Hokage's office, doing research and helping with diplomatic relations and working towards rehabilitating all those injured in the way and—

Shikamaru is always there, just around the corner.

He stops by her labs and pulls her away to come get lunch with him. He's assigned to the same diplomatic party. He's sitting on Ino's terrible couch laughing at a joke with a drink in his hand, his hair loose and—

They rebuild.

 

 

 

It's not sudden.

How could it be sudden, when they've known each other for years and years and years?

It's just that one day Shikamaru is giggling into his dango as Sakura sparkles, her arms thrown wide as she tells a story, and when she finishes with a triumphant punchline, he just shatters into laughter, all over the table.

Sakura smiles delightedly at him, cuffing him gently on the shoulder and Shikamaru catches her hand and just—

He holds it.

And he doesn't want to let go.

It's only when he's home and it's been hours but he's still smiling that he realizes that he's a colossal idiot.

 

 

 

"You don't know," Shikamaru says, staring at her incredulously.

"Know what?" Sakura demands, throwing her arms out in exasperation. Of course she doesn't know, he won't fucking talk about whatever it is.

Shikamaru shakes his head and runs his fingers through his pony tail. "How in all hells do you not know? You're supposed to be clever!"

"Hey!" Sakura says, stung, forcibly stopping herself from admiring the way his biceps flex as he pulls viciously at his hair, the tendons in his neck all too obvious when he drops his head back and huffs in exasperation. "I am plenty clever, thank you very much!"

"Then how do you not know? Everyone knows Sakura, they have for ages!"

She stomps a foot and it is an effort to remember to not push any chakra into it. She wants to break something, bruise something. Preferably him.

With her lips and tongue and fuck. Just stop it already, Sakura.

"Know what?"

Shikamaru finally rips his hands from his hair and stalks over to loom over her. She absolutely does not cower from him, even if he's suddenly much too tall and much too close and all she can smell-hear-feel is the cloves of his cigarettes and her heart thrumming too fast and the burning heat of him hovering over her.

"This."

And Shikamaru pulls her face up to meet his, bringing her to her toes even as he swoops down, and crashes his lips down on hers like the ocean on the shore.

All coherent thought is wiped away. She drowns.

"Oh," she manages when he finally pulls away, her lips slick and swollen.

"I'm in love with you, you troublesome woman."

Sakura blinks. "Oh."

Oh, oh, oh.

Four years of lunches and laughter and pouring over books and sparring and, and friendship is coming into focus.

Shikamaru is watching her carefully with dark eyes, the set of his shoulders wary and tense. And it's strange, because he's usually not that much taller than her, but he's definitely not slouching at the moment, and Sakura feels strangely delicate and small.

She catches his hand, and draws it to her mouth.

His lips part on a gasp when she presses a kiss to his palm.

"I'm in love with you too."

 

 

 

 

"I didn't intend to kiss you, you know," he mumbles into to soft skin of her shoulder.

Sakura laughs. "A bit late for that, now."

Shikamaru doesn't squirm as she traces circles along his back.

The room is dark and heavy with the two of them.

"That's not— I just— I was going to take you on a date, first."

Sakura laughs again.

Shikamaru pouts.

"I'm pretty sure we have been dating for the past two years, Shika," Sakura tells him. "Ino is going to be so smug."

Shikamaru groans into her skin.

"She's going to be insufferable."

Sakura rolls them so that he's on his back and she's looming over him, haloed by the shadows of the room.

"Don't worry," Sakura says, "I'll protect you."

"My hero."

(Ino is the one who eventually breaks into his apartment and throws some clothes at them.

"Come on, you losers, we're celebrating you two geniuses finally figuring your shit out. Everyone else is already at the bar."

"We'll come find you when we're done." Shikamaru tries to wave her off.

Ino snorts. "Yeah, no, nice try. I learned better than to leave you two alone with just a shōgi board. If I go now, you're never going to show."

And then she throws open the curtains, and leaves the bedroom door open behind her.

"Five minutes, let's go!"

Shikamaru and Sakura are silent for a long moment. And then they collapse into giggles.

"C'mon," Sakura murmurs, "if we go now, we can probably find somewhere to cloud watch before Ino realizes we've escaped."

Shikamaru kisses her once, deeply.

Sakura always has the best ideas, and the best hiding places.

He's keeping her, forever.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt:** "I didn't intend to kiss you."


	7. daylight so violent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sakura knows exactly what kind of a future she wants and what she will sacrifice to ensure it comes to be. all of team 7 fighting for the same future. it’s nice to be in agreement again, finally. it’s just too bad, sakura thinks as she cleans blood out from under her nails under the fluorescent lights of her bathroom, that she’s the team member without the legacy to push that future forward with anything more than the brute strength she holds in her hands. too bad, that she’s the disposable team member. (she’s always been so good at doing what was asked of her, and oh, but konoha asks it’s faceless children to die and die and die for its wars. sakura just isn’t willing to let there be another one after her.)

Sakura withdraws gracefully from the spotlight. If, in fact, she was ever really there are all.

(She was, of course, but it was never on her own behalf. It was only ever because of the people she could be connected to, all those impossible legacies that were never hers to bear, only ever hers to stand witness to.)

Sakura withdraws to her lab and the hospital and the anonymity of her jōnin vest.

Respected, for her service and her skill, but just another face in a crowd, just another set of hands holding blades.

Once, she thinks she would have mourned this. Would have raged. Would have thought it unfair and so far beneath what she was owed.

Sakura knows now that the world owes her nothing. It never has.

(That’s why she steals what she wants and holds it fiercely until the world gives up on taking it back or it shatters in her hands.)

Sakura falls down into anonymity.

And it is relief.

She itches, now, when there are eyes on her, when her back can’t be against a wall, when she is out in the open and unsafe.

She knows what to call this, but it’s hard to distrust her paranoia when she knows now, all too well, what the cost for not paying enough attention is.

Konoha released monsters into the world and left them to roam free, secure in their superiority and their ideals of goodness and mercy.

It almost cost them everything.

It almost cost the whole continent everything.

Sakura knows now that the only true promise of safety is godhood, and despite what men like Madara and Orochimaru thought, men cannot become gods.

She knows this, because she’s put her hands through men who thought that they were gods and they bled the same colour as every other human being she’s split open and taken to pieces.

(Tsunade touches fallen soldiers and, with a single spark, brings them back to life, gasping, their souls hers to hold. Men cannot become gods. Women, however… Sakura is undecided.)

Tsunade-shishō is the only person who looks at her—looks right at her, returning her from wraith to girl again—and asks if she is sure.

“You don’t have to,” Tsunade-shishō says.

And Sakura thinks of Naruto, bright enough to outshine the sun, the future’s promise writ blinding across his brow, all the Village’s hopes cradled in his palms, his childhood dreams so close within reach.

And Sakura thinks of Sasuke, so broken that he doesn’t know how to stand still anymore, who will never set foot in the village again (even for Naruto), but who, even now, is wandering with Naruto’s promise of a brighter future for them all as the wind at his back, under his wings.

Sakura thinks of the weight of legacies and the cut of the Hokages’ faces where they march across the sky.

“No,” she says to Tsunade-shishō. “I don’t. But this is my choice.”

And she smiles.

(Sakura is wondering why Tsunade-shishō looks so sad as she looks at Sakura smiling.)

It’s only her choice if she makes it now.

If she waits, it will rush onwards, overwhelm her—an inevitability.

Sakura steps out of the spotlight and neatly into the shadows.

 

 

 

 

 

Only later, Sakura wonders if it should have been so easy to slip out of her skin and leave her name behind.

Probably not, but then again, Sakura never wanted to be herself to begin with.

 

 

 

 

“Sakura-chan,” Kakashi-sensei startles. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

Sakura waves. “I’ve been busy.”

Kakashi-sensei’s gaze darts over her. Six months ago, and Sakura wouldn’t have noticed.

But it’s been six months now and her bicep no longer itches.

Kakashi-sensei’s mouth opens a fraction on a sigh and his eye gets even droopier. “Stay safe,” he orders.

Sakura darts forward and drops a kiss on his cheek before he can avoid her.

It’s the only thanks she knows how to give him.

(As her lips touch the scratchy fabric of his mask, branding him, she wonders if she means it as a thanks at all. The heat of her will linger, and that will be a reminder, a haunting, a curse.)

 

 

 

 

“A research position?” kāchan asks, her hands freezing on the tongs as she reaches to serve herself.

Sakura nods.

“Oh, thank the gods,” tōchan blurts out.

Sakura turns her gaze to him, her father who loves her and who wept when she walked into her childhood home wearing a jōnin vest.

He takes her hand. “Now we know you’ll be safe.”

Rice turns to ash in her mouth and Sakura swallows it down with a smile and a gulp of water.

 

 

 

 

“Shikamaru,” says the Rokudaime, “meet Rat. You’ll be responsible for overseeing ANBU and other dark ops branches. Rat will be one of your liaisons.”

Shikamaru’s dark eyes sweep over her, considering.

“Anything else I should call you?” he asks her.

The porcelain is as cold as bone against her pursed lips. “Rat is the only name that matters.”

“Ah.”

 

 

 

 

“Why do you do this?” he asks her one night, scrolls of plans and numbers and movements spread all around them.

Sakura pops another grape into her mouth and relishes the way the skin bursts when she bites down.

“It needs to be done.”

When he stares at her, she has to look away for the sadness there.

 

 

 

 

Sakura’s lab is shiny, all sharp metal surfaces.

She hasn’t had a real conversation with Naruto, an honest conversation with Naruto, in seven years (in ten years, in seventeen years), and so she thinks it’s nostalgia that he funds her research so well.

Nostalgia, and the fact that Sakura’s lab does some of the most groundbreaking research in medical advances and chakra studies on the continent.

Not, of course, that anybody knows that.

That’s the whole point.

But the Konoha hospital is revolutionary and the shinobi ranks are healthy and their veterans are taken care of and the population is thriving under the Nanadaime’s reign.

All is as it should be.

 

 

 

 

Ino’s face is curving, her smile all softness and joy as she watches Sai bouncing their daughter on his knee, laughing at something Chōji has said.

All around them, children are running and their friends are safe and happy.

Sakura clutches at her glass of water and tries not to flinch at every sudden uptick in screaming, reminding herself that it’s in excitement and not fear.

“I never thought we’d make it here, y’know?” Ino says, marvels.

Sakura looks around at this future she is ensuring.

“I know,” she says.

 

 

 

 

The sheets on her bed are musty and the cot in her office at the lab holds a perfect imprint of her body for her to slip into and close her eyes for a few hours.

 

 

 

 

As she stares up at the Nanadaime, his speech washing over her, Sakura thinks that she might have been jealous, once, of the way that Shikamaru stands so securely at Naruto’s shoulder.

Sakura had never felt, not once, as sure of her right to be there as Shikamaru is every time she sees him.

Now she just feels respect for the work Shikamaru must do.

Sakura doesn’t know for sure, of course, as she spends very little time around the official business of running the village, but given what she remembers of Naruto, Shikamaru must be responsible for much of how well Konoha is prospering.

Not that Sakura doubts Naruto’s abilities: he’s an excellent commander, an excellent leader of men, who cares about every person under his protection and who loves with all his heart.

But Naruto was never much of a political thinker or an administrator, and for all his instinctive understanding of people and their motives, and for all his dedication and hard work, Sakura cannot imagine that the particularities of trade or clan relations come easily to him.

(All Hokages, Sakura knows from studying under Tsunade-shishō, have their strengths and weaknesses. And all Hokages must know how to surround themselves with people who cover for those weaknesses and turn them into strengths. If Naruto is good at one thing as Hokage, Sakura suspects that it is inspiring loyalty in talented people who would fight and live and die for his dreams.

He was, after all, so adept at it before.)

Respect is cool and dry under her breastbone.

(It aches in bad weather.)

Sakura doesn’t wonder about the dark circles under Shikamaru’s eyes. He’s too far away for her to notice them, if they were even there in the first place.

 

 

 

 

Sasuke’s staring at her strangely, his eyes swirling, but for all the supposed wonder of them, he doesn’t recognize her.

He’s trying, she thinks, but he has no idea who she is.

“You’ll get my reports to Naruto, unopened and quickly.” It isn’t a question but an order.

Sakura nods. “Hai, Uchiha-san.”

She pretends to herself that she isn’t offended by his doubt.

She’s a professional.

She is very good at her job.

Sasuke nods and disappears into the forest.

Sakura lets him go, the scrolls heavy in her hands.

Behind her, the compound is still burning.

“Taichō?” Bear-san asks.

Sakura nods. “We’re going home.”

 

 

 

 

Men bleed so easily.

Sakura learned this at age thirteen, sometime between standing with a dead fish under her hands and retching into a bush as Lee held back her hair, Tenten grimly slitting the throat of an enemy dying by inches, Gai-sensei’s face solemn and hard as he crouched in front of her.

“The Village sees your sacrifice, Sakura-chan, and thanks you for it.”

When Sakura strides through dark hovels or lit streets, plains and forests and beaches, men dead and dying at her hands, she wonders if the Village knows.

(They don’t, of course. That’s the whole point.)

 

 

 

 

“Stop killing yourself.”

“I’m one of the most talented healers on the continent. I’m very hard to kill.”

“Yeah,” Shikamaru snaps, “well, you’re just as good at killing, and I’m not so keen on figuring out which ability of yours is going to win out.”

 

 

 

 

At some point, Rat became Sakura again.

It was a mistake.

 

 

 

 

Walking through the village is an exercise in dodging.

When she tries at it, she can be less than a ghost.

(One day, someone will reach out to touch her and they will fall right through. She’ll have stopped being real.

One day, she will be able to rest.)

 

 

 

 

“We missed you at Inojin’s birthday” reads the back of the photograph that’s been shoved into her mailbox.

Sakura pins it to the wall in her office and pretends that doesn’t ache.

She’s too good of a healer for her to be carrying pain around that she doesn’t know how to fix.

 

 

 

 

Shikamaru doesn’t flinch at the blade she has pressed to his neck.

“I could have killed you,” Sakura says.

Shikamaru scoffs, rolling his eyes. “You say that as if you didn’t know I was here the moment you got in a two-block radius of your apartment.”

Sakura goes to roll off his thighs but Shikamaru puts his hands to her hips and anchors her back down into his lap.

It’s no weight at all but Sakura sinks for a moment.

He’s warm and alive underneath her and she wants to tuck herself under his chin to sleep.

She stands up and stalks to the other side of her living room.

“What do you want?” she demands.

“Sakura,” he sighs.

And Sakura flinches.

She doesn’t remember the last time he said her name.

Or, well, that name.

“Would you rather I call you Rat?”

She flinches further still and then snarls, pulling herself up to her full height, her hands aching for the way they’re curled into fists.

He has no right.

No right to bring that here.

That’s a secret that no one knows.

No one, except the two of them and Tsunade-shishō who gave her the name and Kakashi-sensei who gave it to Shikamaru for safekeeping.

Sakura turns and goes to walk out the door.

She doesn’t want to put him through a wall: her apartment building and the surrounding area won’t survive if she starts fighting with Shikamaru.

And everything will be for naught if she ruins the Hokage’s second-in-command.

“You need to stop running away from the truth, Sakura. You need to stop lying.”

Sakura punches him in the face, and hates him for letting her.

Shikamaru laughs and spits out blood onto her floors.

It’s so dark in here but the moonlight turns his blood to silver pools.

Sakura runs.

The shadows curl around her heels, but Shikamaru lets her go.

 

 

 

 

Kabuto’s head makes a satisfying squelch when she drops it on Shikamaru’s desk.

He doesn’t flinch. He just stares at the face and the growing puddle of blood for a good long moment.

“Is it enough?” he asks, finally.

Sakura falls to her knees, the sudden lack of weight too much.

And she cries.

Nothing is fixed and nothing is over. But she is done.

She is done.

She is finished.

 

 

 

 

“The war was over,” she tells the shadows of Shikamaru’s bedroom.

She pretends that she can’t see the sliver of him that is catching the strip of moonlight slipping through a crack in the curtains. She pretends it’s just her and the comforting shadows.

“The war was over, but there were too many people still out there who thought that they could play god and make the world in their image. And I couldn’t have it. Not again. And everyone else just wanted to forget.”

“We wouldn’t have let them be forgotten.”

Sakura ignores the shadows whispering.

“Under shishō we were too tired and under sensei we were too busy rebuilding. And Naruto is too forgiving. He would have given them a chance and they would have taken that chance to hurt us when we least expected it. Never again.”

“It wasn’t your decision to make.”

Sakura looks him in the eye, pitying.

She is Haruno Sakura.

She is a shinobi and healer.

It has always been her duty to destroy and remake.

She is the student to Hokages and the teammate to legends.

It has always been her duty to see to it that they survive another day, whatever the cost.

She is a holder of the Will of Fire.

It has always been her duty to ensure that she leaves behind a world better off than the one she was born to.

“Someone had to make it. And I learned when I was twelve that I was disposable.”

Shikamaru makes a terrible sound, like Sakura’s cut something out of him.

And then he kisses her.

He tastes like iron and salt and everything she thought she’d given up.

“Never to me,” he swears to her.

Maybe one day, she’ll learn to believe him.

 

 

 

 

Sakura takes Shikamaru’s hand, and steps out of his front door, into the sunshine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt:** ShikaSaku Week Hanami 2018 Day 1 "Shadows/Light"


	8. this tumbling stone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> he knows her but as a peripheral object in his solar system. that changes. shikamaru just tries to figure out the mathematics of the radical shift in their orbits, tries to calculate the exact moment their trajectories were set to collide.

Shikamaru is sharing the news of the day—the Yamanaka’s received a new shipment of flowers and they’re worried about the safety of trade routes to their southernmost suppliers; Chōji’s ankle is healed up and has stopped giving out on him unexpectedly; according to Ino, Haruno Sakura is now working under the Hokage as Senju Tsunade’s apprentice; Asume-sensei sends thanks to Yoshino for having Team 10 for a team dinner—when his parents exchange considering looks.

It would be uncouth to demand to know what they’re communicating and embarrassing to let on that he can’t figure it out on his own.

Shikamaru considers what he’s shared but nothing in particular, he doesn’t think, should have caught their attention. Tōsan almost definitely already knows about the problem with the trade routes and the uptick in attacks on trade caravans.

He makes a note to keep an eye out for future considering looks or muted conversation in relation to any of it, and turns back to his food.

He trusts that his parents will let him know when he needs to.

And if not, well, he’s a Nara and a shinobi. He’ll figure it out.

 

 

In retrospect, Shikamaru probably should have expected to come home one day to find Sakura sitting at the table in his kitchen, helping his mother prepare dinner.

She’s Ino’s friend, after all, and has been for years.

It hasn’t been unusual to find Sakura suddenly underfoot throughout his childhood, for all that Shikamaru’s never bothered to pay much attention to her.

She’s Ino’s, which means something, but has never meant enough that Shikamaru has bothered to get to know her more than one inevitably gets to know a person who has been on the periphery of their childhood, shared classes and shared acquaintances and all that.

Shikamaru knows that she claims to be in love with Uchiha Sasuke, that she always had surprisingly good insight on political situations during class discussion, that she cries easily and laughs loudly when you catch her by surprise and once coldly broke a classmate’s arm after they made a scathing remark about civilian deaths being inevitable and never apologized for it despite the lecture she got from Iruka-sensei about solving arguments without violence. And Shikamaru knows that she is a genin without at team: the most frightful creature to exist in Konoha where team is paramount.

And now Shikamaru knows what Sakura looks like in the particular light that shines through the kitchen windows when the sun is setting, all honeysuckle and the scent of old trees.

She’s laughing at something kāsan has said, knife sure in her hands as she slices vegetables, and Shikamaru stands in the doorway for a long moment, caught.

“Kāsan,” he finally says. “And Sakura.”

Sakura looks up, her bangs slipping across her eyes, and she pushes them behind an ear as a grin splits her face. “Hi Shikamaru! I ran into Nara-san at the market, and she invited me over for dinner. I hope you don’t mind? Your mother is very persuasive.”

“Yoshino-san, if you must, Sakura-chan,” kāsan admonishes with a sly pout.

Shikamaru stares hard at his mother for a long moment.

He thought—

Ino isn’t here.

He’d thought—

Something bright and essential is leaking out of Sakura the longer he goes without answering, her shoulders rounding up infinitesimally to her ears, embarrassment filling her cheeks.

“It’s nice to see you,” Shikamaru finally manages. “How can I help with dinner?”

Kāsan quickly bustles over to take the knife from Sakura. “Oh, no. Now you’re home, you can entertain Sakura-chan; she’s been so kind to put up with this old woman. I can handle dinner, you two go have fun.”

“It wasn’t an inconvenience, Yoshino-san,” Sakura is saying, but his mother is bustling her up and out of her seat, and over to Shikamaru. “I really don’t mind helping. Are you sure?”

“Very sure. You’ve done an excellent job on the eggplant, mostly all that is left is cooking. Shikamaru, don’t bore the poor girl too badly. I’m sure you can think of something to do other than shōgi.”

Shikamaru has no idea what is going on.

“Oh, but I, um”—Sakura is wringing her hands slightly—“I like shōgi. I’m not very good,” she rushes out, “but I would like to learn?”

Shikamaru doesn’t like the quick flash of delight that chases its way across his mother’s face.

“Well then, I’m sure you two can keep yourselves occupied for a half hour,” kāsan says.

And, suddenly, Shikamaru and Sakura are staring awkwardly at each other in the front hall.

Sakura is looking at his ear.

Shikamaru clears his throat. “Shōgi?”

He pretends he doesn’t hear Sakura’s sigh of relief when he leads her out onto the porch and into the evening sun.

 

 

“So, Sakura-chan,” says tōsan that night at dinner, “I hear you are studying iryōjutsu under the Godaime. How are your studies?”

Shikamaru tilts his head every so slightly and reconsiders the situation.

Ah, he thinks.

This was unexpected.

He wonders if it should have been.

 

 

It isn’t a routine, after that, but every few months Shikamaru finds Sakura in his kitchen with his mother or chatting about medicinal plant use in the forest with his father or eating dinner at his table.

And she’s around elsewhere, too.

She’s laughing with Ino or at the library nodding to him as she staggers by under a pile of books or bustling in and out of the hallway at the hospital where Shikamaru is waiting until he can go in and say hello to a cousin who was injured badly on a mission or— she’s around.

Which, of course she is, because Konoha isn’t that large, especially not for shinobi of a similar rank and age and path.

It’s just—

Shikamaru doesn’t know.

It’s just that suddenly Sakura isn’t just Ino’s friend, but his. And he is trusting her to have Ino and Chōji’s back when they take the chūnin exam together, Shikamaru gnawing at his fingernails in the stands as Ino gets licked once, twice by a fire whip, retreating and trying to disengage until suddenly Sakura is just there, her hands around the boy’s head and a sharp crack as she renders him unconscious.

Two years ago, and Shikamaru hadn’t trusted Sakura to help bring her own teammate home.

And now here they are, something like friends and Shikamaru’s most precious people entrusted to those small hands and their green tipped nails that Ino had painted one night on the journey here, the two of them laughing as they tried to cajole Asuma-sensei into letting them paint his nails red.

 

 

He found her once, slouching his way home in the grey pre-dawn after a late arrival after a mission and an even later debrief.

She’d been too wide about the eyes, sweat-drenched and dripping with something that tasted like despair, and Shikamaru had paused, arrested, at the sight of her shattering trees in an otherwise empty training ground, everything silver and shadows.

Sakura had looked up from the debris of a stump splintering around her fist to spot him, green eyes turned to something inhuman in the not-light, and Shikamaru’s heart had stopped.

Looking at her was like looking out at the ruins of Konoha after the Otō/Suna invasion.

And Shikamaru had stood there, looking, bearing witness to the destruction of this girl he’d known for years but had never bothered to get to know and—

Sakura had turned away and slipped into the forest.

Shikamaru had let her and he never mentioned that night, to anybody.

If, occasionally after that, Shikamaru had wandered the training grounds at night, keeping an eye out for girls with bloody knuckles and their souls strewn across the ground, well—

He doesn’t know.

 

 

When the war is over and they’ve washed the last of the mud and the gore from their nails and their hair, they start to rebuild.

Shikamaru stumbles home after a too long day spent attempting to figure out how to feed so many people (not enough people) on what remains of the village’s food supplies and arguing with merchants and the grain board and so many others.

Shikamaru is exhausted, and he isn’t expecting to find Sakura kneeling at his mother’s feet, clutching at kāsan’s hands as she cries.

Kāsan is weeping, her shoulders hunched in grief, the sobs torn out of her.

She sounds like a wounded, dying thing and Shikamaru’s heart shudders under the force of his own grief. In sympathy, in recognition.

He hasn’t seen her cry yet, but here she is with Haruno Sakura at her feet, and she is mourning.

“Kāsan,” Shikamaru croaks, and she looks up at him.

He flinches.

Her grief is too raw and not for him to witness.

He doesn’t know why or how Sakura is here, witnessing, but he wants to sit with them and let the dam he’s put up break, shatter, give away.

Looking at Sakura sitting at his mother’s feet, Shikamaru thinks that, without a doubt, Sakura could withstand that which he’s been so afraid will sweep him away.

She’s withstood more than he’d ever thought her capable. She could withstand him at his worst, at what he’s never allowed himself to surrender to.

“Sakura,” he says, a plea or a demand or a prayer.

“I grieve with thee,” Sakura tells his mother. “Shikaku was a good man, and I will miss him very much. He always had the most wonderful stories to share about the plants and the stars. I hope that something of him will live on every time I share one of those stories in turn.”

Shikamaru sits in the doorway, his knees giving out from under him.

Kāsan tries to smile and it is awful, like the slash of a knife across her mouth, but she is smiling even as she weeps.

Sakura talks, about what she knows and of what she’s heard.

Shikamaru listens, eyes closed against the fading evening light and the lengthening shadows.

At some point he sleeps, lulled by the rise and fall of Sakura’s voice and the soft static of his mother’s hiccuping breath.

 

 

“One day you will marry for the good of the clan,” his father had told him.

Shikamaru had scowled and rocked awkwardly, longing to be as far away from this conversation as possible.

“Never forget, my son, that you are the clan and the clan is you. The woman you choose must bring you joy, for your joy will be the clan’s joy. And as she makes you a better man, so she must make the clan better. Your strength will be our strength, just as our strength is your strength.”

Shikamaru hadn’t understood.

As he watches the way his mother smiles at Sakura, something pure and untouched by grief blooming, he thinks he might be beginning to.

 

 

“I don’t understand,” Sakura says.

She is carrying a weight Shikamaru doesn’t understand in her eyes, and he aches with it.

“Marry me,” Shikamaru says (pleads, demands, prays).

“You’re a Nara. You’re the clan head. And I’m just Haruno Sakura,” Sakura says, begging him to understand her, begging to understand.

“Yes,” Shikamaru says.

Exactly.

“I’m no one,” Sakura says.

And in that, Shikamaru hears blood and sweat, legacy, destiny and hard work that will never amount to enough.

Once, Sakura broke another child’s arm for a snide remark about the disposability of civilians.

Haruno is a civilian clan.

Sakura has always been the member of Team 7 left behind in the end.

Shikamaru takes her face in his hands and Sakura trembles as he traces a thumb across her cheekbone, under those incredible green eyes.

“You matter to me,” he says.

Sakura shakes her head in a half-hearted attempt to dislodge his touch.

Shikamaru places a kiss to her temple, her nose.

“Marry me,” he says. “I love you and you make me a better man and my clan will prosper under your guidance and I will strive every day to bring you joy. Because you deserve it.”

Sakura shakes.

“You owe me nothing, but marry me anyways,” Shikamaru asks, offers, breathes into her as she gasps.

Sakura leans forward that last inch and presses their mouths together.

“How much joy?”

“Boundless.”

 

 

“Did you plan this?” Shikamaru asks his mother as she attempts to smooth down his hair.

Kāsan laughs, her head thrown back. “Oh, my lazy, incorrigible son. I just gave you a chance. It was up to the both of you to take it.”

 

 

The day Sakura marries him, she wears ginko leaves and honeysuckle in her hair, and Shikamaru laughs for joy and grief.

Her hands are sure and green tipped when they take his own.

He kisses her, and all is endless shadows and golden light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt:** ShikaSaku Week Hanami 2018 Day 2 "Blood/Sweat"


	9. sweating our confessions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> elicit kisses/so delicious // swallow me down/and let me drown

Sakura’s hands scramble for something to hold—the paint against her back or his shirt or his hair or something—as Shikamaru pushes her higher up the wall, his hands on her ass and his mouth at her throat.

She tightens her legs around his waist and then moans when he tilts his hips a bit further, mind whitening out for a moment to static as everything turns lightning sensation.

Shikamaru groans in turn, fingers flexing, and they are a symphony of sound, spurring each other to greater heights.

Somehow, Shikamaru gets a hand wedged into her pants, but doesn’t manage to finesse his way into her panties, so he’s rubbing at her clit through the cotton instead, but Sakura doesn’t care as long as he doesn’t stop touching her.

“Faster,” Sakura demands, and bites at his ear when he slows down, just to be an asshole.

Shikamaru bites her collarbone in turn, and Sakura hiss of pain trails off, losing coherency as he finally takes direction.

She doesn’t realize that she’s coming to again until she hears him say, “Do you think you can stop pulling my hair now? The patrol is gone, and I don’t think they’re going to come back until they think we’ll have finished.”

Sakura remembers abruptly that a) she has her fingers tangled in Shikamaru’s hair which has, at some point, managed to fall out of its usual ponytail (she doesn’t think she’s ever seen it down before), b) they have a mission to finish now that they’ve managed to avoid getting stopped breaking into a club sub-basement they definitely aren’t supposed to know about, and c) she’s just turned what was supposed to be a (very cliche) ploy to avoid getting caught into her coworker and friend getting her off.

As nonchalant as she can manage, considering Shikamaru’s hand is still down her pants, fingers coated in her, Sakura disentangles herself from him.

And, considering the whole disastrous situation, she really shouldn’t find it hot when Shikamaru withdraws his hand from her waistband and stumbles for a moment, before shoving it into his back pocket.

She’s pretty sure he just considered licking the taste of her off of them.

His hair is still down and Sakura really wants to run her fingers through it again.

Also, she’s pretty sure she has a nice necklace of hickies blooming along her throat.

“Um,” Sakura says very intelligently, smoothly diffusing the awkward situation.

“This way,” Shikamaru interrupts her, all professional, like he didn’t just grind his dick into her and make her come on his fingers. “We shouldn’t get caught here again.”

“Yeah. Hah! Good thing you think fast on your feet and I’ve had plenty of practice faking it, huh?” Sakura laughs.

It’s only hysterical around the edges, not shot straight through, which is pretty good, considering Sakura has now also admitted to her string of extremely disappointing bed partners.

This, she thinks to herself, is what she gets for winning that last betting pool.

She should know better than to bet on what new dumb shit Naruto and Sasuke are going to get to. Sure, the money is good and she usually has a pretty decent idea of what they’ll get themselves into (the only real, and really actually just depressing, benefit of having been stuck on a team with the two idiots), but it never ends well for her when all is said and done.

If she doesn’t get caught up in whatever it is, Sakura ends up with her shishō’s luck.

Watching Shikamaru’s back as he walks away, the knowledge of what his skin tastes like and what sounds she can pull out of him now living in her veins, Sakura has never known more what it is to lose even as she’s winning.

 

 

“We’re still friends, right?” Sakura asks, much later, when they’ve left no trail behind them, information stowed safely in her thigh pouch.

Shikamaru looks at her across the fire.

She can’t read him in the flickering light, shadows turning his face into something foreign.

“It was for the sake of the mission, and we’re both adults,” Shikamaru says. “We’re just fine.”

He smiles at her.

As Sakura falls asleep, she tells herself that he hasn’t left her feeling cold.

All she wants from him is his friendship.

It’s more than enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt:** ShikaSaku Week Hanami 2018, Day 4: Secrets/Lies
> 
> Maybe this AU will be revisited one day...

**Author's Note:**

>  **Prompt:** ShikaSaku Week 2017, Day 1: Duty/Free Will


End file.
